CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

[Cheerful theme music begins] 
 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 
 

In this episode, author and CIIS professor Craig Chalquist is joined by ecotherapist Linda Buzzell for an inspiring conversation about tackling our climate anxiety by cultivating eco-resilience. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on April 14th, 2021.  
 
A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
[Theme music concludes] 
 

Linda: Hi Craig, it's great to see you! 

Craig: You too Linda. Thanks for being here for this. 

Linda: Oh, happy to do that and really looking forward to this discussion. I thought maybe we could start by dealing with the first part of our topic, which is eco-anxiety. What does that involve? I mean we hear about climate trauma, eco-despair, all these different words for it. But what is it that we're really facing?  

Craig: Yeah, great question. As you know that term is kind of popular right now as a buzz term. We both, you and I get asked about that by news media and other people online, you know, and what's usually meant by it is the well, it's framed as anxiety. I disagree that it is, but you know you watch the news let's say and you see that the numbers are horrible in terms of what's happening to the planet ecologically or images of melting ice caps and stuff like that. And so, people will freak out about it, and they're understandably upset and the reason I don't like the term eco-anxiety is that for one thing, I don't think it's anxiety anything. I think it's rational fear. There's quite a lot of people at this point who are directly impacted by climate change and it's not just people watching the TV there are mass movements all over the planet and also people getting hit who can't afford to move, they're getting hit the hardest. So, for them, it's not an issue of anxiety at all its survival. So that's one reason I don't like that term, another is that it kind of makes it sound as though it's curable. You know, what's the pill for eco-anxiety? Right? What's the treatment plan and all that. And you know, the comparison that I've used in the past is if suddenly the news announced that an asteroid was headed directly toward our planet and it was going to kill most of us, nobody would be talking about how do you cure astro-anxiety? We'd be doing something, right? And I think that's part of you know coming to grips with it. And actually, not only facing it up to it in realistic ways but finding ways to sustain oneself and help other people, too.  

 
Linda: I think that's the key, isn't it? To somehow not get stuck in this. Which seems like a lot of people are really, you know worried about getting stuck and even therapist talk about the doom and gloom, it's making people depressed, it's making people anxious, maybe even making people suicidal. What are the steps that we can begin to take as we take in all of what's going on, we don't deny any of it, but then we don't want to get sort of bogged down in it to the point where we can enjoy our lives? We can't make a difference. 

Craig: Yeah, as we both know from our psychological work, there's this marvelous thing known as mechanisms of defense. And when something is emotionally intolerable, we tune it out. That's pretty much human nature to do it and if people are bombarded by depressing statistics or horrible facts, then often times what they'll do, especially if they're not in immediate danger is they will tune it out or it'll just bounce off their defenses some other way, they'll distract themselves or what have you.  

So it seems like a necessary first step is to encourage people to have some sort of a support network of others who get this and who understand it, you know, I'm thinking of growing up in a violent house and being an abuse survivor and I remember the kids on my block would say things like, “god your dad's really mean” and you know, “he's beating you guys up” and all. I just couldn't hear that because it wasn't safe to, you know? [Linda: Right.] Like a lot of kids who grew up that way. You just can't hear it. It's too disastrous to take in. You don't have any way of processing it, you know. But then when I got to college, and I started being exposed to psychologically minded people and I had four really great supportive roommates. One day of professor read a paper I wrote, and he said, “are you aware that you're an abuse survivor?” And at that point I was able to say, “I am now”.  

So, what that taught me, and also lots of work with people not just abuse survivors, but people going through other kinds of trauma is that oftentimes defenses will prevent us from really coming to grips with what's happening unless there's a container already in place of some kind. Some sort of support network that we can lean on and help each other through this, and I think that's where we have to start in some ways, not with the just the news, you know, although we need to be aware of it. 

Linda: That reminds me of the Good Grief Network, [Craig: Yes.] which is exactly that - providing support for people. I think it’s critical. What about if people get stuck in anger or they throw themselves into activism and they feel like that's going to fix things? How does that work do you think? 

Craig: I was thinking of this a little bit of my depth psychology training is going to reveal itself here I guess but or bias, whatever we want to call it. You know, there's this figure of the hero who's so big in our culture and heroism can have many meanings but one of the things that it brings with it is a very heavy price tag, and you know, when you're on the front lines of doing something dangerous and activism often is, its if you do enough of that, and I've talked to a lot of activists about this you can get burned out. It's very difficult dangerous unsatisfying work and you know, including being demonized by one's political opponents and all kinds of horrible stuff and being called depressing by other people and so on and so forth. So, I think there has to be some resources for people who do that very difficult and necessary work.  

Linda: So, how can we get some kind of balance in our lives? I'm really interested in what you've been talking about lately, this five-fold caring idea. How can we do that?  

Craig: I'm going to see if I can actually bring that up on my screen. Let's try this. Can you see that? [Linda: Yeah, great.] Okay. We yeah the so this is something that you and I have worked on a bit and this is the latest version of it as you can see. And so the way I hold this is that it comes from a place of caring a paradigm of caring which is another way of saying relationality, in order to get through these kinds of global scale catastrophes, we -carrying has to be absolutely central, we have to support each other through it because the heroic posture of the lone, you know, the lone change maker who rides into town and does various things and rides out again is done. That's never going to help us with all this.  

So, if we if we switch to a paradigm of caring that's inspired by a number of things, the activism of people like Rebecca Solnit, the work of permaculture ethics and I'm thinking of Carol Gilligan's coming to voice and her talking about caring in a psychological context. All of these on the screen here and I'll read them out too, to me they overlap and fold into each other they do they're not strictly separated. So, what I do for myself when I'm feeling especially overwhelmed by the demands of life in a pandemic and climate change in the world is I go through this and I ask myself first of all, how am I caring for myself? You know, am I looking after my physical health, my mental health, do I have enough contact with the natural world? The book you and I put together has all sorts of things about that, about how healthy that is. Am I getting enough emotional support? And then care about others. Am I looking out for people who can't look out for themselves? Am I good ally to people who need it? Am I involved in social justice, in activism of whatever kind? And am I thinking about people down the road, future generations. Care of Earth so things like simplicity circles, not using up a lot of the resources that we have left, care in terms of minding places that have been damaged and helping in the repair of them, doing something about the climate. There's lots of organizations taking this on right now and then just looking after the places where we actually live locally too, you know?  

By care of vision, I'm thinking about those dreams that tune us into the collective situation. And one that always comes to mind is a dream that Carl Jung had in nineteen, think it was 1913. It was a year before the first world war, and he dreamed about it. And I have a lot of students and colleagues now who are telling me that they're dreaming about different kinds of environmental catastrophe. It's now happening. They were dreaming about it before it happened. So tending that and actually making a place for not nor non-ordinary states of consciousness that tune into the deeper rhythms of what's happening on our planet including intuition and even inspiration which I can see more about, and then the kinds of stories that we tell about who we are and why we're here in this particular time, and that word enchantivism is one that some of us have been using to tell stories that may start in injustice and rupture but they are larger than those situations.  

They're more spacious than that and they give us some sense, not only of what we're against, or what we're fighting, or what have you, but where we want to be, what sort of communities do we want to live in, what would we be delighted by? What can we imagine and dream together, you know? So, I think that's a quick point of going down that whole list of five-fold caring that we've written about and talked about.  

Linda: Well, what I love is the whole idea of including dreams and enchantivism, imagination, visioning - to me that seems like what's been missing from the whole conversation about how we should be dealing with things like eco-fear and eco-anxiety. Because maybe you can help us explain to us more why we actually need the imagination, how that's going to help us stay balanced as conditions get worse, as more trauma happens, bigger challenges. Why is it that we need those two pieces so much?  

Craig: Yeah, I think of imagination as something foundational to consciousness. Foundational to relationships, to how we live every day. When we think about it, everything that we do that's of worth, and even a lot of things that we do that aren't perhaps [laughs gently], began as a fantasy they begin to some imagining and I just don't see how we can move into the kinds of just and equitable and sustainable and diverse cultures that we want to live in unless we can imagine them first.  

You know like you, I follow news and social media and I have an Instagram and I see a lot of very accurate statements by all kinds of people including activists about exactly what's wrong. You know what the injustices are, and we need that news. I don't want to be heard as saying we don't. You know, we absolutely have to know what's going on and not be in denial about it, but that to me is only half the picture. You know, what does it look like when things work? What does it look like when we get together and talk about what our dreams tell us? Not just night dreams but dream in the sense of aspiration. [Linda: Yeah.] There's an actor named Sonequa Martin-Green who was interviewed by CBS. She's the lead character in a show called Star Trek Discovery, that's now entering its third season and they were asking her -it was long enough ago that I don't remember exactly their words, but it was something like, you know, why did you decide to accept this character in this show? It's kind of different from what you've done before and she had the most interesting response. She said I think that if you can imagine utopic possibilities, then that actually takes a step toward making them happen and I like that way of thinking about it.  

And so, if we can start with stories about that and there's lots of them, there's anecdotes, there are you know it appears in fiction. There's a whole genre called Afrofuturism that basically says if Black people were front and center in all this what would that look like and it's producing fantastic stuff. There's a Wakanda Lab online that is actually geared toward taking the Black Panther movie images and values and worldview and showing activists why this kind of thinking matters. This kind of imagining, you know, so there's really good stuff happening with all that.  

Linda: Yeah, seems like climate scientists themselves and then journalists have just been bombarding us with daily facts in the news and there seems to be no awareness that that's sort of very one-dimensional. It's not it's not hitting the human heart where it needs to. 

Craig: Yeah, in a way, it's a novel situation in this in the sense of being a planetary crisis. You know, there's people who have dealt with if we want to call it eco-anxiety who have dealt with it forever, I mean ever since there was colonialism and imperialism and all the rest of it, conquest. They that's their life, you know, and it's not anxiety. It's rational fear like I mentioned earlier. But I think the planetary scale of this is new and some of the journalists and other people who are trying to make us aware of how dire things are they, you know in their mind I know they're trying to do us a service and to say wake up and this is really severe, and we need to actually act and I get that's their motivation. You know, but I think one of the things that we're all having to learn is that that's not enough to mobilize people particularly when the crisis is so severe and on such a planetary scale. 

Linda: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really important because I think that's part of what's traumatizing people and then re-traumatizing and you and I have written a little bit about this whole concept of a long emergency. This isn't like one traumatic event where I can sort of deal with it in a certain way. It's repetitive trauma and it's even escalating trauma and I think it actually is very dangerous that we could get caught up in that negative side of it without having this kind of balance that you’re talking about and one of the things that I know we're writing something now, it's going to be published through an anthology of Oxford University Press where we're really talking about how the arts are also important and the humanities. You can speak a little bit about that why we need all that when we're in this crisis?  

Craig: Yeah. I think that they've never been more important. The kind of psychology that puts on a white lab coat and says we have to have everything be evidence based and measurable. It does tell us interesting things. It gives us interesting facts to play with, you know, but it's built on a natural science model that only sees things from the outside. [Linda: Right.] And in that model, it's actually subjectivity, that's the enemy, you know, they- it tries to eliminate subjectivities so we can be objective and measure how variables each other and it's a really good model for studying externalities, the external parts of things, but it's a terrible model for trying to understand the human story.  

And that's where the methods and the inquiries of the humanities come in. That's where history and social justice and fiction and fantasy and novels and music and philosophy come in. Historical studies showing us where we've gone wrong before and what we can do about it, things like that. And there's a whole set of inquiry tools from the humanities that are just as rigorous as those of physical science. They're just used differently so that to me seems like the toolkit that we need even as we look at the physical science and say yeah, it's valuable and we get it and you know, the ecological science that's telling us exactly what things are what things are happening, you know, we need that science too but the humanities have always been a call to conscience. They've always told us where we fall short as human beings but also what the mature human being looks like.Tthe humanities tell us which voices are being silenced that we need to hear from. There's so many benefits that come from them that I think it's just criminal that they are as underfunded as they are in this country. So, I think we need them more than ever and also to imagine the kinds of outcomes that we want. We need them for that too. 

Linda: And yet higher education seems to be thinking we should close down our departments of the arts and humanities, and everybody should you know get into the stem occupations. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. It's an act of self-mutilation at the level of heart and soul. I think.  

Linda: Yes, yes exactly.  

Craig: Yeah, it's exactly the wrong direction to go in and you know, we're not saying that science isn't important and that it shouldn't be listened to that's you know, that should be obvious. I think that it needs to be supplemented by the other side of things so that they work together, at CIIS we talk a lot about integral approaches and that would be an example of one.  

Linda: Definitely, we do need that integral approach. I find Joanna Macy's work really inspiring in this. That she's of course been dealing with the issue of how to deal with trauma ever since you know, gosh, I guess 56 years ago dealing with you know, the fears of nuclear problems all the way up to the present and I think that if we do nothing else we have to get over this idea that we can just focus on it with one mode of knowing and that that's going to help us fix the situation. For one thing, it doesn't seem like a wonder a very joyful life to live and whatever the outcome of all of these crises we're dealing with, we need to be able to enjoy life today. [Craig: Yep.] And really revel in everything we do have and not just be in fear of things that we are losing or might be losing. 

Craig: Yeah, we don't seem to realize that the technology that can cause so much destruction as well as good things, you know, as well as relational things that are happening including, I think this event, you know, it's many-sided and so we tend to forget that technology created Chernobyl which was one of the key triggering events for Joanna Macy as she told me when I had lunch with her some years ago. [Linda: Right] So, you know technology creates terrible weapons. It creates industries that if they're not regulated are just ripping huge holes in the planet. I mean, there's all kinds of fallout from it and literally as well as other ways, you know, so, you know speaking of the humanities as we were a minute ago I often think of that book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and how it came to be, you know, as a telling of ghost stories in Geneva on a rainy night, and it was interesting because Percey Shelly who she married eventually they were they were a couple at that time, although they weren't married yet and as part of this ghost story thing Mary Shelley went she was frustrated because she couldn't think of a good ghost story. So she went to bed and had a dream about a monster leaning over the scientist who created it and so while she was doing that and turning that into a novel, Percey Shelly was working on the other side of things and he was writing Prometheus Unbound and what a great god the innovative Prometheus is, you know, we could think of him as a technology god in some ways, you know, and you know, he does have his upside certainly but so they were working different sides of the same kind of archetypal or mythic presence and it's interesting to me that the subtitle of Frankenstein is The New Prometheus and that refers to the doctor not the monster. So that book ought to be required reading for everybody who goes into some kind of technically oriented science.  

Have you seen those…there's been a couple of recent documentaries that showcase people who were originally involved in social media groups like Facebook and Twitter and some other ones and they're talking on camera about how they didn't know the terrible uses that these things would be put to, and have you seen those? They're just they're remarkably revealing. [Linda: No, I haven’t.] Yeah, and it just it makes me sad because it's they say the same thing that Robert Oppenheimer said after the atomic bomb went off and it's that same regret and I thought wow if you'd read Mary Shelley or some of the other things that the humanities have The Sorcerer's Apprentice for instance. That old story. [Linda: Right, yeah.] Yeah, you might have had a clue about that. This is a bad road to go down, you know, or at least that it's fraught that at least there needs to be some kind of reflection, you know? 

Linda: Exactly. I'm hoping we can talk a little bit about community solutions because I've been starting to write about that, and I know you have this concept of the “heartstead”. What is a heartstead and how can we go about building those in our own communities? 

Craig: Yeah, we use that a little bit for Immanence Journal which is a myth and folklore journal that's been on hiatus for about a year and it's going back up again at the end of the summer. And what we did with that is that, so the basic idea of a heartstead is that it's a circle of people who want to accomplish something and they pose a question to themselves that they want to solve and then they talk about that and what would be involved and then they each go up and do homework on it and bring back different ideas for how to move forward and it's similar to a structure that's used in many different settings even in corporate settings for generating ideas. But it goes far back into human history and I'm thinking of Bell Hooks writing about public home places for instance that were refuges for people under slavery where they could have informal conversations about how to survive and stay together, you know, and there's other forms of it to there's the Zapatista snail shells for instance, cells of revolution and there's all kinds of other forms as well all the way back into history.  

It seems like the small group is the human default for when we are threatened by something, and we need to be with each other with support of other people and then come up with new ways of dealing with it. So, a heartstead, unlike a homestead doesn't take any territory. You can do it in your living room or outside or on a street corner or wherever and it's an ongoing group of people who have a problem to solve and want to know how to do it. And so, there's different ways this can look but the idea is for people to support each other and be creative and have a sense of the actual place where they are and try to move forward somehow. It's I think it's a form that we've often relied on as a species over time.  

Linda: And it reminds me of Joanna Macy advising all of us whatever you do during this trying period don't even think about doing it alone. [Craig: Oh no, yeah!] I mean, that’s so wise I mean if there's anything that's actually dangerous and it could cause eco-anxiety or trauma- climate trauma, all of that to get worse is if we somehow wall ourselves off from other people and from rest of nature and think that you know, again, it's that heroic idea, isn't it? We could do this just by ourselves. 

Craig: It's heroic and maybe a bit Promethean. Prometheus is, for those that don't have a mythic education, he was a Titan which is one of the older race of Greek gods and he's famous for stealing fire from the heavens and bringing it to human beings. And so that was a good thing obviously, but he was a bit of a rebel too and there are other aspects of his story that could bear some reflection including his impulsivity and recklessness. He was a bit of a trickster figure. And so it was actually Athena who taught him what we would now call technology and the technological skills, and that seems to be important but this idea whether you're coming from that psychology or from a straight-up hero or heroine psychology, the idea that you can do it alone is as you're saying Linda, it's dangerous. It creates burnout. I've talked to activists and climate scientists and other people who are just pulling their hair out with frustration.  

I got a letter some years ago from David Suzuki in Canada. And I can't remember if I either showed it to you or told you about it. It was a short response to something that I wrote to him about and I could feel that tone in him too you know, not anywhere near giving up but just, you know, just the heaviness of all this, you know, opposition and ignorance and other things that are faced by people who do that kind of work. So yeah, incidentally there's an interesting part in that novel Frankenstein where the doctor is the one who's telling the story and he is looking back on this disaster where he basically created his own shadow, his own dark side in the form of the monster, you know, and he says something like he's castigating himself because he had a very go it alone attitude. I'm going to I'm going to create something that ends death. I'm going to solve the problem of death, and I'm going to do it on my own in my laboratory, you know. [Linda: Mhm.] And so later, he says something like if your work causes you to abandon the ties of warmth and affection that make life worth living your work is unlawful which is to say not befitting the human mind. I think that's a good warning for all kinds of projects.  

Linda: Yeah, I think that that brings me to another point that we made in this article about combining old and new knowledge. Can you say something about that? How do we know what new knowledge is safe to really include, what about the whole cyber movement? What about you know, and what about things that we need to rescue in a way from the past that could be really useful right now.  

Craig: Yeah, it’s all so tricky. I mean when you know, especially when idealistic people create something new, whether its technological or something else new laws news this or that, you know, they do it with the best intentions and you know, especially if they don't have any education in the humanities or depth psychology, they might not be aware that we have an unconscious that does all the creating too and that all of our least desirable impulses are in the mix as well. So, it seems like what we need when we think about new knowledge is we need kind of a devil's advocate whether it's inside of us or actually in our heartstead and I've suggested that heartstead circles have one of these where someone comes up with new ideas and then the cynic of the group, you know thinks up all the ways that they can be abused. You know? Here's what a psychopath would do with this right? I mean it just it's stunning that no one thought of that with the internet, right? You make everything that goes on anonymous so that you can never trace email or anything else, you know who came up with this. I mean, it's such a lack of knowledge about human nature, you know, and it's not that we're all evil or corrupt or that we needed, you know to keep an eye on us like Freud would have said but there's definitely a big chunk of us that are you know are going to do the worst because we can, right? There are people who will blow stuff up just because they can and no one is stopping them, and so we always have to watch out for that we always have to be vigilant, and we whenever we come up with something new there always needs to be somebody who says how can this fail and who's going to be hurt by it? You know, so I think that would help anyway.  

Linda: Yeah, it reminds me of the idea of the precautionary principle, which we have to use. 

Craig: Yep. Exactly. Yeah exactly. What can go wrong and yeah. 

Linda: What can go wrong, right.  

Craig: There's so many examples of that too you think we'd learn our lesson by now. You know so many examples of technology gone wrong, or money systems gone wrong, or what have you, you know new things that were set up to benefit people that just turned into nightmares, and you know. 

Linda: I know I'm really worried about the whole cryptocurrency movement, right? 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, I probably should learn more about it. But yeah, I've been in you know, as you know, I've been experimenting a little bit with virtual reality, and you know on the one hand it's fascinating that you can, at least in a simulated way, flyover live volcanoes and walk on the bottom of the ocean and things like that. But there's such a possible shadow side to all this. I mean you can imagine all kinds of heinous uses this would be put to, and it reminds me a lot of the, to mention Star Trek one more time, the Next Generation which introduced the Holodeck which is a lot like virtual reality and how often it would break. You know and horrible things would happen. So. 

Linda: You know another thing that we've been working on a bit as this whole issue of eco-spirituality. Where does that fit into eco-resilience and being able to stay positive and enjoy our lives while we're doing our activism?  

Craig: That's such a huge question, there's you know, I think in terms of how at this point pretty much all the world religions have issued sustainability statements, statements that call for safeguarding what's left of the Earth and of nature, which I think it's a positive step. So, there are people who come from particular traditions and if they look back in their traditions there often is a pretty strong nature honoring component to them. Do you know that, are you familiar with The Green Bible? 

Linda: Yeah.  

Craig: Isn't that great? Yeah, for people who don't know there's a Bible that was created that the all the nature honoring statements in the Bible are highlighted in green letters and there's lots of them. I mean hundreds of them, if you flip through you come across some everywhere and it's you know, and then of course that's from the Christian tradition and then the traditions that went before it too, but I think in all the different religious traditions there is that same nature honoring part of it. If you look in the right place, you know, so there's that it's in Islam. It's in Judaism. It's in all these other ones Buddhism of course and Daoism is an obvious example, but then there's the group of people who don't belong to a particular tradition and you know, what do they need? And so, I keep thinking about how in many different kinds of nature work there's a sense that nature itself is sacred. That the Divine voice speaks in it as well. I've recently been writing a book on hermeticism which comes from ancient Egypt. It actually comes straight out of Egyptian religion as it mixes with other cultural currents in Alexandria about first and third centuries and when you read the Corpus Hermeticism which is one of the major philosophical collections of hermeticism. There is such a reverence for earth and the cosmos and it has that feeling of awe and there's even a part of the Corpus Hermeticum that says imagine what you would see if you could actually sail over the Earth and look at it that way, you know, and I think what we've done that with earthrise and with the overview effect that astronauts talk about and you know, so talk about a book that was ahead of its time.  

Linda: Exactly, yeah one issue that I really concerned about is that we don't seem to be very committed to any particular place at least those of us in sort of modern Western Urban culture. We seem to just move around and never be never really land anywhere. Is that an important part of being eco-resilient? Can we just keep moving and moving and moving to the next place? 

Craig: Yeah, I it's getting harder to move. Yeah, especially with climate change, right? It's getting harder to move. So for more and more of us, that's not going to be an option in the future and that's something that we're going to have to face. But you know when I'm thinking of classes that I teach and terrapsychology, which is my version of a combination of ecopsychology and depth psychology and some other things and so we look at how places for instance speak to us how they get into us how they are mirrored in our own internal moods and thoughts and activities and things like that and the voice of place is something that we don't take very seriously and yet it shows up all the time in different ways. So it seems like if wherever you are, even if you are on the move if you have some sense of who is there and I'm thinking of the our permaculture training, right? Where you observe this as much as you can the seasons of the land and the plants and the animals and the terrain and the geology and things like that those get into you those start to matter to you and I think we form an attachment that way too. 

Linda: I think that's right. And I think we also it's really enriching to learn as much as you can about the history. And if you're a settlor that the native cultures that really own this land. I mean, there's so much we can do that's really deep to reconnect with land wherever we are, but I just think it's become way too easy to just pick up and move. Yeah, but because of that lack of commitment, it feels like the plants here the animals here, they don't get the attention the trees the land itself that we just feel like oh, well, if we get tired of you will just move on. Yeah, except of course, there is no Planet B there's nowhere to go at this point, you know, people have the fantasy that well I can move to this place and climate change won't be so bad there, but I really don't believe there are many places if any left on the planet right now where you could say, oh, well climate changed and climate trauma is never going to touch you if you live on that place. 

Craig: Yeah, you know even at the polls, I mean they're melting so I guess if you're a good swimmer you could make a go of it. But yeah, yeah the question then becomes what do we do about here? Exactly. We listen to the land here and do it need some. Yes. We both live in California, which is burning up all the time now. Yeah, any time you look at a fire map of California, there are dozens of wildfires burning in big regions all year-long. There's no fire season any more really, although it's worse than the fall especially up north, you know, but what are we going to do about that? Yeah. That's the those are big questions. They are whatever we do whatever we do. I think we have to do it together.  

Linda: Yes. 

Craig: We can do self-care like I was mentioning earlier. There's a lot we can do to calm ourselves down and we can have mindfulness practices. We can have a spiritual orientation if that suits us, you know, and things like that. There's a lot we can do that way, but in the end, we stand or fall with each other and that's I hope that's one of the takeaways from this conversation is that we have to do it together. We have to dream together and grief together and everything so. 

Linda: Can you tell us a little more about Earth dreaming? How does that work?  

Craig: So that's the name I've given to the practice arm of terrapsychology Earth dreaming has to do with embodying practices for reconnecting with the natural world. So it borrows heavily from ecotherapy which we've worked on. You actually were the one who made me aware of ecotherapy. I didn't even know it existed until you told me about it. So there's this a big component of that and a big debt to eco-therapy as well. But Earth training can be used as a personal practice and even as a form of spirituality for people who want to use it that way and it has to do with reshaping your life in such a way that you're, to the extent that you cannot even in cities, you're living in that chord with natural rhythms. So for instance most of the time I don't set an alarm clock. I usually just wake up before the sun gets up because my body wants to and then when it gets dark I go to sleep or a little bit after dark depending on the time of year. I noticed I slow down in the winter and I just instead of trying to work through that I just do it particularly around here are the Northern Hemisphere, you know around December and January, I just kind of slow down a little bit. I pay attention to how my schedule both fits and doesn't fit what's happening around me in the community I live in, I pay attention to the foods that grow well here and which ones can I eat and things like that, who are the animals that are here? So Earth dreaming is part of all of that. It's a way of deliberately living a bit closer to the natural world. And the great thing is it's it can be done to the degree that people feel comfortable. You don't actually have to go out in your backyard and camp if you don't want to, just doing it in steps when it rains paying attention to that and you know, where is it raining in me and questions like that, so. 

Linda: I like that, my favorite nature connection method is gardening. I just love that. Do you have some other ones that you really find very healing for you? 

Craig: Yeah, I have so many let me think of a good one to talk about. There's what I like to do. I like to teach this one too when I'm teaching classes and workshops. It's a kind of a kind of relay race, but not really. What I ask people to do is we go outside somewhere and you know a park or a beach or it doesn't have to be somewhere that feels wild but it can just be somewhere kind of scenic where there's animals and plants around and so I have people set the intention that they will at the end of whatever amount of time they have to spend on this an hour or half an hour or 20 minutes or whatever. That the place itself will reveal something important to them that they need to know. It's very simple. It's an exercise in imagination can be done playfully. And so then I ask people to stand still and just breathe and get back in your body and then I have them look around and I say notice what you could playfully think of as a signal right just because this is part of this is fantasy, you know, so you look, and it looks like there's a tree branch waiting at you or there's an insect that suddenly flies right by you and goes in a different direction or there's an animal that does something or whatever. So, I tell people that's your guide so follow that creature or go toward that tree or whatever it is that shift of color, you know, and when you get to end the end of that path stop and wait for the next one and the more time you can put into this the better it works. Although it can be done, you know, 20 minutes or whatever. So I asked people just to go from guide to guide and to move across the terrain that way and then eventually and your intuition kind of tells you when you're done and sometimes something about the place tells you too, when people come to the end of it they see something beautiful or they understand something about the place that they're in they usually have some kind of revelation and I haven't yet encountered although I suppose it's possible, but I haven't encountered anyone who says, well, I got to the end and nothing happened, which was always my concern when I first started teaching it. I thought that would be a real dud, you know, something like that happened once to me, but I just kept going. I was just I took that as an indicator that I wasn't done. So, I just kept going and then something did happen and I went wow, that's what it's about, you know. So, I like that practice.  

Linda: That's a good one. My husband and I were in a voluntary simplicity circle for a decade and it's interesting how that if these related to eco-resilience it somehow really simplifying your life. And of course not buying things one of the things that really hit us was when we were being urged by our family to get a new car because we were driving this old funky Volvo, which was what a great car and was still going but somehow, you know in this culture that's not considered okay, and some of my husband's relatives were a little bit embarrassed that we were, you know, not keeping up with the Joneses and it really took being in a group like that of people telling us. No, this is a good thing and I'm wondering if you've had any thoughts about that whole idea of keep it simple. Keep it low tech see what you can do to really revamp your lifestyle so that so that you are more resilient. 

Craig: Yeah, I keep thinking of the way things were built these days especially technology. It's built to be throw away. Although Apple now does have a recycling program, but who the heck knows where that stuff goes and whose country and ends up whose backyard and ends up and all that toxic stuff in it, you know, but I keep thinking of how how did Andy Fisher put it, you know, these big these big industries these big retailers, they sell us what we don't really need in the first place like little bits of stuff that were that were alienated from the beginning. I can't remember exactly but the way we use the planet for that we turn the earth into raw materials and then we consume them. We're consumers now instead of citizens, right? Yeah, so I often think of that image and how the more you consume the less satisfied you are on that level, you know, the emptier you feel and how that just doesn't go anywhere. So the whole thing of you know one particular form of this is brand loyalty. I can understand wanting to buy something because it's made by people who make good things. You know, that that makes sense to me, but the whole brand loyalty thing goes way beyond that and there's people that just get in fights over. This one's better than that one and it's like wow, they're really on the hook, you know.  

Linda: Yeah well, it really is an addiction, you know for a while I was in a Debtors Anonymous group and twelve-step groups have a lot of wisdom in them, and it was amazing to me what -how our life changed when we stop using credit cards and stop buying less, you know buying less stuff. One of the bizarre things that happened was we actually had more money which we hadn't anticipated. It's really shifted how we felt, we had more money to give away to share with other people and more money to put away for ourselves as well. It was it was shocking how much money we actually spend on just stupid stuff that trashes the planet and actually impoverishes us.  

Craig: Yeah, yeah, absolutely and what it does to us financially to in addition to all that. 

Linda: Exactly because you know people who are so dependent on the next job and have no savings can be very easily manipulated and exploited in the workplace. So there's a whole lot I think that's part of eco-resilience is getting the kind of lifestyle that really fits you suits you and and you know your family your loved ones and also is good for the planet and it gives you so many more choices of being able to do the stuff that is really important to you and important to the planet and not being such really a slave in this situation. 

Craig: It's funny too, how all this works in a circle the way an ecosystem does the way everything feeds everything else. You know, we sometimes have especially in the environmental movement they split social justice from looking after forest for instance. But if you're really thinking in the round the way nature does, you know that self care and caring for other people and making sure everybody has enough and looking after the Earth are all part of the same kind of thinking the same kind of participatory worldview. 

Linda: That's right. Exactly. You know another thing we started working on and writing about was this whole idea of trauma teams and preparing your community and not just assuming that you're not going to need it. And you know, we discovered this the hard way in the midst of horrible wildfires and suddenly as an ecotherapist I found myself as a first responder. I never thought I'd be first responder on the front lines, but that's really where we all are going to find ourselves and did does our community have traumatized trauma teams ready? Are we prepared? I mean if we're really going to be resilient the whole community has to be ready at a moment's notice. Now one of the weird things that's happening in California is I think we have the best fire people in the entire planet right now that unfortunately they've had so much experience that we really we all know the drill now we as citizens, as people who are on the front lines, we know exactly what to do. We know how to deal with drought that we didn't use to 10 years ago. Drought was oh my gosh what we do but now it's like we're beginning as a community be prepared and I think there's a long way to go. We need to be a lot more prepared. 

Craig: Yeah absolutely. I was talking to my aunt. I guess it was several months ago during one of these many endless fires that we have here now. And she was she was a paramedic, a firefighter and a forest ranger and she's now retired and she said I'm really glad I'm not out there anymore because it's so much worse than it used to be. It's some so much harder on firefighters and emergency personnel are you know, and then you hear people talk to here in California about root causes and how preventing native Californian fire regiments led up to this and ignoring technical traditional technical knowledge and you know from the people who I'm thinking of the chairman of the North Fork mono tribe. I forgetting his name at the moment that he was he went on camera to talk about this and how he's used this beautiful image. He said when we burn things, you know, because the California needs to burn it needs to regenerate through fire and we weren't just clearing things out but we were creating a situation where we see through the forest so that it wouldn't get so bulked up, you know because our babies our carried in weeds that they can see the world through and we see through the forest and that's part of how we think tribally you know, I thought that was an amazing way of describing it and in depth psychology we talked about seeing through for instance too complex or what have you but this particular tribe has been onto this forever, you know, so that's a part of all this too is listening to what they have to tell us. 

Linda: We're so you know, we're so young on this land in terms of those of us who are not indigenous and maybe it's going to tell you I don't know if we have 10,000 years to really listen and learn to the to see what the land is telling us. So we really better listen to the people who do know. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, I think part of were storytelling comes in maybe is here, you know, the original stories that were told the ones that are okay for us to repeat, you know, because some of them are there they belong to the tribes they came from the or the original people they derived from but there are a lot of stories that really circulate and as you know, I teach folklore from a psychological perspective but also from an ecological perspective and there's a lot of old stories from around the world that have really good ecological knowledge embedded in them, you know where the kangaroos like to go and things like that. But in addition to that they also have psychological attitudes about if you behave this way toward the natural world good things happen. And if you ignore it bad things happen, there's lots of stories like that. So.  

Linda: Let's come back around to music and the arts and dance and you know being in circle together and making noise. I mean, what is that, what role does that have in real eco-resilience?  

Craig: We tend to think of those as entertainment or distraction or stress relief and they can do that. But have you seen these remarkable videos of people who arranged dances all over the world? You know as a show of unity, there's something to call the great green wall that's now stretching across the middle of Africa and it's on the ground it looks like wildlife corridors and it looks like regenerating soil and creating work opportunities for desperately poor people. So, it's doing a lot of very tangible community good but as part of that there are festivals that are connected with it as well. So, there's that whole side of us. I think that sometimes we learn through play through and through playing with each other and through music and dance and art and things like that. So, you know art not only being the barometer of the time and of course for seeing things that are way down the road, you know, plenty of examples of that people have talked about that for a long time. But also as a form of participatory action and one thing I'd like to see for enchantivism is more of us doing performative work. Yeah. I was talking to the drama therapy people at my school at CIIS about that a little bit last I think it was not last semester the one before that but and they're onto this. So an activist know that to there's all kinds of activists art and weaving even weaving circles and dance and all kinds of things very necessary. 

Linda: Yeah, I'd like to mention food here to the only reason our voluntary simplicity circle lasted 10 years is we did potlucks every two weeks. We'd pay for the food, it was great. I mean, I think that so traditional in any culture to sort of cement relationships within your community within your tribe within your family. You have to gather together cook together eat together. Hopefully, you've grown some food together. I mean these are really important things for the human soul.  

Craig: Yeah, I'm reminded too of old stories, you know in the west we call them myths other people call them their sacred stories, but you know myths and folk tales and fairy tales where the gods or their equivalents, you know in that particular Pantheon are so intimately connected with the natural world, including the gods of enjoyment and the gods who were tricksters and dancers. There's there's Oshun from the Arusha pantheon who you know is all about enjoying life and you know and also intimately connected with fresh water. And so, you know as we go yet again into a situation of drought in Southern California where we waste tons of water every year makes me wonder, you know, kind of fancifully like what does Oshun think of this, you know, if I were putting myself in her place, what would I think of it? Figures like that, but she's also connected with enjoying life. So, you know and Aphrodite from the Greek side of things same thing when she came up out of the water and walked on dry land grass grew in her footsteps. So, we tend not to think of her so much as an ecological goddess, but she is one in some ways. She reminds us that the details of life matter that we need to play sometimes and enjoy ourselves. So. 

Linda: I think that's so important. I mean that word enjoyment. It's like that's the perfect balance. I think to what we're up against which is not an enjoyable. But if we can just balance our lives our communities with enjoyment that really makes us it gives us the strength to go on. In face of horrendous challenges. 

Craig: Yep. I think it's really striking that kids even when they're poor and abused play, that the so intrinsic and we tend to equate play with childhood, but they're starting to be more research on play and adults and and the many good things that happen as a result of that and it's something that we could recover pretty quickly. There was somebody in one of my classes who asked me, you know, what would be a good way to get into that space of imagination and playfulness and creativity and all that and I was thinking of somebody who's within what my pandemic bubble here at during this covid-19 time and she's 8 and I play with her so I was like go play with an eight-year-old, you know, they're all over this. They know how to do it. Just just make them your teacher and learn from them. You know. 

Linda: I think we have huge joy deficit and I think a lot of people are very confused about what will make you joyful. Not a confused with a substance or a toy that you're gonna buy that's expensive and I mean we really have lost the basic knowledge of what what gives joy to the human heart. I mean for me part of it is roses. I love roses. They bring joy. I'm sure everybody has their own favorite things that they could point to but real joy is nothing like the kind of ephemeral things that pass for pleasure. It's much deeper than that. 

Craig: I think it can include pleasure. But you know, I'm thinking of how one of the things that we tend to do is especially when we're doing hard work and the world like activists do who are actually are real heroes, you know and heroines. Yeah, but here all people but I think there's a kind of guilt that comes with that where if it doesn't hurt it's a puritanical thing in the states may be but you know, if it doesn't hurt then we're in denial. Or we're not really fighting hard enough or something like that, you know, but when you look at people who really move and shake human history and get changed done, they always made time for that somewhere. There was some way that they just went off and just did things. You know that were fun, so fun is good. 

Linda: Good, good! So, I think what I'd like to do now is ask Craig, do you have some closing thoughts for us?  

Craig: A couple quick ones one. I want to be sure to do that. I should have done at the beginning which is to thank CIIS Public Programs for hosting this event and for the help that you gave us at the beginning especially and also running this as we're going, so thank you for that. And I want to thank you Linda for being here and having this conversation about these really important items. They're getting more important as the years go on, you know as both of us know and ever more urgent. So, thanks to you as well.  

And I think maybe a last thought would be if you feel overwhelmed by eco-anxiety or whatever it is that we want to call it. Maybe a place to start is to do some self-inquiry on what aspect of all of that really gets to you some specific aspect, you know, is it that clean food is up for you, or the way animals are treated. Are you a vegan and you need to go that route? And find out more about that or do you want to be one? Is some form of social injustice happening that you need to address? Racism and all the other things we suffer from around the world authoritarianism. There's often one particular thing that bothers us that gets out us more than others. So, I would say take the thing that lands in your heart and run with it because that's where the world is speaking to you. That's where the world expects from response and if you can take that one thing on then you won't feel so overwhelmed by everything else that's going on, even though it overwhelms all of us at times. So, I would recommend doing that and getting support from other people while you do because as we keep saying, you can't do this alone.  

Linda: Perfect. Well, thank you so much Craig for sharing all this great wisdom with us and thanks to CIIS. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
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